Kangaroo a.k.a. Klokan: The Kindness of Strangers

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

It is said that writers are people who, as children, did not receive sufficient rejection either from adults or peers and so are compelled to seek it relentlessly in later life. In these crazy times, we have to keep our eyes on the things that matter most: the life and health of our families, our communities, the planet. And to keep our sanity, some of us need to reserve a bit of time for reading and for writing.

In these crazy times, we also need to remember that the phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday. Hugh Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever. And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7." Long Tail in publishing is larger than the Dragon head

Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk the greater the faith.
”SÃ¶ren Kierkegaard

We hear a lot these days about publishing becoming more and more risk-averse, the bean-counters taking over, and so on .... This is of course a massive generalisation and there are some great things coming out both here and overseas on a regular basis - perhaps the larger problem is our excessively concentrated media world, which narrows our chances of learning about new and exciting work!
Yet all that mankind, poor and rich, famous and unknown, has ever done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. So how depressed one has to be to resurrect the Coldest War; but also how desperate, how hungry, how large the desire to embrace the spirit of freedom. When society forgets its mistakes, those mistakes are bound to repeat. As difficult as it is, the horror of the Iron Curtain has to be taught and has to be told and only then can we guard it from ever happening again. There's so much to be learned from this, so much from Cold River. It's not just speaking about my experiences, it goes way beyond that ...

In the comentariat of 'My Surreal Vienna' a reader kindly notes: Jozef Imrich has written the War and Peace of escapes. It lends new meaning to the word 'harrowing' and one sometimes shudders to read it. But deep down, beneath all the layers and the masks, there lives something unconquerable in Jozef's hurt spirit... Cold River careens into what for most readers will be emotional terra incognita, with grief too deep for words or tears.

Most of us don't like risk and uncertainty. That's too bad, because there's no shortage of either. Why do we write about the most risque and painful experiences in our life? Are we wallowing in the misery? No. Writing helps expunge our grief and lets us heal. Our most powerful weapon is emotional honesty ... While much is left to the imagination in any book, I console myself with knowing that everyone's first book is autobiographical to some extent. In many ways, the surreal reality of writing the escape story across the Iron Curtain was a bit like constipation, it had to come out in the end ...

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble ... "Sunlight is the best disinfectant -- all great CEOs encourage transparency and openness as long as sensitive data is not leaked, Cold River author Jozef Imrich told us Naked Thorns in the Roses

CODA: Support Independent Bookstores:
You can buy many of the books mentioned on Double Dragon Publishing from Powell's, the online branch of one of the West Coast's finest indie bookstores. Or you could find a local bookseller through BookSense if you prefer.